Modern Arab Propaganda has incorporated Nazi
Propaganda

The charge of aggression by existence, however,
was only the opening... The next phase was the charge of further aggression
by expansion.

The Arabsí rejection of the Jewish state in
any form was deepened and sharpened by another development. Though subjective
and contrived, it held a momentous and ugly significance. As though to
harden themselves and their people against any weakening of resolve, against
any tendency to come to rational terms with Israel as an existing fact,
the Arab intellectuals and leaders evolved a comprehensive creed, an ideology
of hatred, to justify the physical destruction of the Jewish state, even
the extermination of its people.

Little heed has been paid to this phenomenon
outside the Arab states, even by the prospective victim herself. Just as
the program outlined in Hitler's Mein Kampf was largely ignored and his
prescription for the "solution of the Jewish problem" dismissed as the
rantings of an unbalanced mind, so presumably has the stated purpose of
the Arabs been treated as too incredible to be taken seriously, despite
the frequency and the unanimity with which it is expressed in speech and
in writing. As much of it as has been translated has apparently been assumed
to be fringe literature. Nothing could be further from the truth.

This literature consists of hundreds of
books published since 1948 in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq,
in addition to thousands of articles. They range from the vulgar and the
primitive to the sophisticated and pseudo-scholarly. Their theme is that
the liquidation of Israel is not only a political necessity, but also a
moral imperative; that Israel and its people -indeed, the Jewish people
as a whole-are by their very nature evil; that it is thus not only desirable,
but even permissible, to destroy them. This doctrine has been compounded
by a large measure of old-fashioned anti-Semitism. In comprehensiveness
and absence of restraint, the Arab demonology probably goes farther even
than the worst excesses by the German Nazis heralding their "final solution"
of the Jewish problem.1

There were cases after 1948 where Arabs
with a Western education were compelled to admit that, if Egypt was governing
Gaza-which was certainly not part of Egypt-and if the government of Transjordan
was governing eastern Jerusalem-which was not part of Transiordan-it did
indeed seem to be the Arab states that had invaded western Palestine. Yet
the Arab attack, they claimed, was an act of self-defense. For the establishment
of the Jewish state was as such an act of aggression against the Arab people.
Israel-was established in order to destroy Arab nationalism. This was a
constant theme with Abdel Nasser. "we all know," he said, for example,
on May 14, 1956, the eighth anniversary of the birth of Israel, "why Israel
was established. Not only to set -up a National Home, but to be one of
the factors in liquidating Arab nation.

Any Arab attack on Israel was therefore
an act of self-defense, any act by Israel to defend herself against attack
was a new act of Zionist aggression. Consequently, when Israel retaliated
against Arab sabotage and murder across the Armistice lines, it was Israel
that had committed a breach of the Armistice Agreement. Moreover, every
achievement by Israel that strengthens her or improves living conditions
in the state is considered an act of aggression against the Arab people--
the opening of the new Knesset building in 1966 was one such act of aggression.
Any act of friendship toward Israel by any state or individual is a hostile
act toward the Arab people.

The charge of aggression by existence,
however, was only the opening of the Arabs' black charter. The next phase
was the charge of further aggression by expansion. A considerable literature
thus developed on Israelís plans to expand at the expense of the Arab states.
A Syrian Ba'ath Party Conference resolution in October 1966 declared that
Israel "serves as a solid base for attack, to secure the interests both
of imperialism in the zone and of the reactionary regimes-- threatening
constantly to swallow other portions of the Arab homeland and to destroy
their Arab qualities."2

The forces at the disposal of Zionism
throughout the world are capable, once they strike roots in Palestine,
of threatening all the Arab countries and to be a frightening and constant
danger to their lives. The means employed by the Zionist forces for growing
and expanding will put the Arab world at their mercy, paralyse its vitality
and prevent its progress and improvement in the scale of civilisation-if
the Arab is allowed to continue to exist at all.3It is thus an accepted belief throughout the
Arab world that there is a map on the wall of the Knesset in Israel delineating
the borders of Israel in accordance with the divine promise in the Bible:
from the Euphrates to the river of Egypt.

The charge of expansionism was, however,
not in itself enough. It was elaborated to read that it is not the desire
for expansion that motivates Israel, but sheer hatred of the Arab people.
Israel seeks to destroy their unity, she is the enemy of their liberation,
their independence, their progress. "Israel has an abiding hatred of all
that we do for our advancement," wrote one Arab author, "because our advancement
spells death to Israel."

Distributed throughout Arabic literature
is a substantial list of activities pursued by Israel to this end. Israel
is said to have interfered in various international negotiations to prevent
the grant of loans and other forms of aid to Arab countries, in order to
keep them backward. Again, Israel has been fighting Arab culture. In order
to minimise and distort Arab achievements and capacities, Israel executed
a comprehensive plan for installing Israeli lecturers in American universities
to teach the Arabic language and culture. This was done in such a way as
to bring the Arabs into contempt. In Africa-so the Africans are told --
Israel has distributed falsified copies of the Koran and of various Christian
writings.

Inevitably, considerable competition reigned
among Arab writers and politicians in the composition of frightening descriptions
of the state of the Arab minority living in Israel. Israel was depicted
as enforcing a brutal oppressive rule over the Arabs, depriving them of
all civil rights, even preventing them from making a living. Arabs in Israel,
the story continues, had no recourse to civil courts, being tried only
by military courts. Their lands and their water for irrigation-were taken
from them. There was not a single Arab among the 35,000 civil servants.
They were prevented from opening their own schools, where their children
could be taught Arabic. They were prevented from celebrating their holidays.
Special taxes were imposed on them. As for religion, they were simply prevented
from going to their mosques. Moslem (and Christian) holy places were constantly
under "attack" by the Israeli authorities.

Now the onslaught deepened. It was not
only in relation to the Arabs that Israel was portrayed pejoratively. The
people of Israel were said to be inherently evil. They were frustrated
by failure, and as a form of compensation, they let the army rule them.
They were cowards, quaking even during times of quiet at every sign of
progress in the Arab countries. In battle they ran away at the very sight
of the brave Arab fighter. Their victories in war were won for them by
the imperialists.

The Israelis were corrupt. The government,
the army, and the police, all co-operated with smugglers, thieves, drug
peddlers, and white-slave traffickers. In fact, there was no government
in Israel to speak of; the country was headed by a number of criminal gangs
who had become a ruling class.

Yet the vilification of Israel and of its
people was only a part, perhaps the smaller part, of the incredible demonic
structure built around its image. The Arabs made a comprehensive effort
to create around the Jewish people as a whole an atmosphere of hatred and
contempt intended to smooth the path, when it becomes physically possible,
to their extirpation.

At first the Arabs applied practical anti-Jewish
measures: They extended their economic boycott of Israel to Jews as such
everywhere. In the Arab states, trade with American companies, for example,
is conditional on their owners, managers, and employees sent to serve in
the Arab country being non-Jews. In at least one case, under pressure from
the Libyan government, an oil company stopped using on its ships Swedish
safety matches carrying a trademark similar to the Star of David.

The leaders of Arab thought gathered up
all the well-worn and some long-forgotten themes of Western Christian horror
stories about the Jews and added whatever was available in the Koran and
other Moslem writings as well as pearls of their own wisdom and presented
the finished brew as "well-known" facts. Throughout all these writings
runs the common theme that all Jews are the lowest, most contemptible people
in creation. They are arrogant, domineering, and cunning; they are treacherous
and cowardly; they are mercenary and wanton; they are liars and swindlers.
They used to destroy states from within by Communist subversion; though
now, since the Arab alliance with Soviet Russia, they destroy them as capitalists
and colonialists by lending money to governments at exorbitant interest.
They hate each other and everybody else. They are parasites who hate hard
work, which is why there are no Jewish farmers. They think of themselves
as the Chosen People and interpret this as the right to commit any crime
with impunity.

Their Bible is an immoral book, being an
emanation of the Jewish spirit, which is intrinsically evil. The Talmud
is no less immoral. By it the Jew, who is forbidden to steal, is yet permitted
to steal from non-Jews; forbidden to commit adultery, he is permitted to
take his neighbour's wife if the neighbour is not Jewish; forbidden to
kill, he may yet kill a non-Jew.

This demonology gone berserk was further
provided with frequent supporting quotations from Western anti-Semitic
sources, such as Hitler or Rosenberg in Germany, Leese or Jordan in England;
from ancient Moslem sources; sometimes, in imitation of the sophisticated
Western anti-Semites, even from Jewish sources.

On the foundations thus laid, the Arabs
proceeded, exactly as had the Nazis, to level the accusations of specific
contemporary evil against the Jewish people which, in Europe, led logically
to the "final solution" of the gas chambers. Thus (borrowing from the Nazis),
they charged the Jews specifically with having corrupted the pure Moslem
and Christian society in Palestine by bringing prostitution to the country.
They borrowed from old Moslem literature to charge them with practising
witchcraft to achieve their ends. Borrowing once again from Western sources,
they held the Jews the eternal enemies of humanity, responsible also for
two world wars.

The list is long; nothing is omitted. The
Arabs do not hesitate to draw on the lowest depths of twentieth- century
anti-Semitic incitement. They became the revivers of the blood libel. The
accusation that the Jews use the blood of non-Jewish children for religious
purposes, usually on the Passover, is disseminated as historic truth over
a substantial range of Arabic literature since 1948. Everything that was
ever written by European haters of the Jews in order to provoke pogroms,
and by the Christian anti-Semites who, to the same end, introduced the
blood libel into the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, is now reproduced
by the Arabs. A book designed to indoctrinate the blood libel was published
under the authority of the Egyptian government in 1962.

Further, the Arabs having committed themselves
to the purpose of annihilation, exploited the most notorious of all the
Christian anti-Semitic fabrications: the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
which has long been a central pillar of the vast edifice of anti-Semitic
indoctrination. More than any other book in the first half of the twentieth
century, the Protocols provided the ideological justification for the physical
destruction of the Jewish people. It was employed in Tsarist Russian anti-Semitism,
it was one of the textbooks of German Nazism, and it has been called the
"father of the Holocaust."4 The Protocols were
taken up by the Arab leaders of thought as a major weapon in their campaign
to prepare the ground once again for the ex termination of the Jewish people.
No fewer than seven Arabic translations of the full text were published
between 1949 and 1967. Harkabi lists five additional books containing précis
of the Protocols and thirty-three in which the Protocols are quoted with
approval.

Imperceptibly, as though it were self-understood,
even this most comprehensive of anti-Semitic libels has been woven into
the official "doctrine" of the Arab governments. The Prime Minister of
Iraq, in an official letter sent on his behalf by the head of his secretariat,
expressed his appreciation to the translator of one of the Arabic editions
of the Protocols in 1967. More significantly, Abdel Nasser called the Protocols
to the attention of a visiting Indian writer, assuring him that it "proved
beyond any shadow of doubt that three hundred Zionists control the-destinies
of Europe."5

To insure total and most fruitful insemination
of their doctrine, the Arab leaders then compiled a curriculum of hatred
for use by their children. The anti-Israel and anti-Jewish catalog became
a basic element in the study of history in the schools, which began with
teaching "ancient Jewish history" to ten-year-olds in the fourth grade.
It was also injected, more subtly and insidiously, into subjects completely-
unrelated to political or national affairs. Geography, grammar, literary
readings, arithmetic, both in the classroom and in hundreds of textbooks,
inculcated the theme of the Zionist or the Jew as the embodiment of evil,
the ultimate bogeyman, the proper object for "killing" or "destroying."

Arab children are taught the blood libel.
In 1962, the Egyptian government produced for use in the schools a reprint
of an old text on the blood libel, Talmudic Human Sacrifices. The new edition
contains an up-to-date foreword by Abdel Qati Jalal, which states: "The
Talmud believes that the Jews are made of different material from the rest
of mankind, those who do not share the beliefs of the Jews being animals
devoid of sense or they are servants and chattels of the Jews.... Their
wise men laid it down that there is no but their own desire, and no doctrine
but their own They commanded their people to bring harm to the other peoples,
to kill their children, suck their blood, and take away their wealth."
This book, like others on the same theme, recounts the story of a number
of the blood libels in history and presents them to the children of Egypt
as proven truth. Nor did the education authorities overlook the Protocols
of the Elders of Zion. This is taught to Arab teenagers as a factual work,
a Jewish admission of the conspiracy to dominate the world.

Under the auspices of the state, the new
generation of Arabs is brought up to hate, despise, and fear the Jews;
to believe not only that it is right and proper for every good and self-respecting
Arab to fight the Jewish state, but that it is just and desirable and even
vital to destroy it; that it is necessary not only to destroy Israel, but
also to treat its inhabitants like an evil growth that must be extirpated.

The annihilation of Israel and of its people
is thus not merely a convenient political objective. It has become a self-understood
purpose demanded by the Arab future no less than by Arab history, by Arab
honour and pride no less than by Arab pragmatic interest. It has become
basic to all Arab thinking, and it is not kept secret. No Arab politician
and-with the exception of one or two notable exiles6
-- no Arab m intellectual has expressed contradictory opinions.

1. The catalog
of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish attack is a very long one. So far only one
scholar has ventured on the task of examining in detail this horrifying
aspect of the Arab war on Israel. Yehoshafat Harkabi has made a study at
once comprehensive and penetrating of the major part of this literature.
What began as a doctoral thesis before 1967 developed into several major
works. They are all presented with scholarly restraint and almost line-by-line
documentation from thousands of publications and speeches, mainly after
1948. The people of Israel, and liberal-minded people everywhere, owe Dr.
Harkabi (formerly a general on the Israel Defence Force General Staff)
a debt of gratitude for the painstaking and tireless research which may
arouse an awareness of the monstrous ideology of hatred that has been injected
into the public mind in the Arab countries and beyond. The material in
the following pages is based largely on Dr. Harkabi's central work, now
available in English: Arab Attitudes toward Israel (Tel Aviv, 1972).

A fully documented, dramatic
history of the turbulent events which shaped the crisis of the Middle East.

"Battleground" is one of the best written and most informative histories
of the Arab-Israeli conflict. ... I advise everyone to read it. - Congressman
Jack Kemp

Reading "Battleground" is an eye-opener. It is well written, informative,
fast-paced and debunks some carefully cultivated myths concerning Israel
and the Middle East. - Former US Ambassador to the United Nations,
Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick